A wonderfully nerdly performance of mental arithmetic. I found his use of word mnemonics to remember large numbers quite cool.
Tags: Mathematics, performance, TED, VideoThere are times when you see things that are almost impossible to believe. Your brain vehemently resists the obvious interpretation because it’s just so bizarre. This, for me, was one of those times.
Pointer courtesy of Mr. Naughton.
It might be worth mentioning that I first saw this (and posted it) without actually hearing the sound. (I was on a machine that didn’t have any speakers on it.) In some ways it was even better silent, esp. the first time.
Tags: simply amazing, VideoThis wonderful little video (produced by some U of M Twin Cities mathematicians) has apparently been viewed over 1 million times now, which is a lot more views than it would ever get in class. I frequently run into faculty that are very intent on holding on to their teaching ideas and techniques, and certainly not sharing them openly with the world. They see those ideas as “their property”, to be guarded and controlled as much as possible. It’s a weird attitude, because almost none of them will ever see any money from those ideas, and the potential for wider viewing and usage is just so much greater if they open up (as in this case).
A good video like this takes a lot of time to produce, but faculty often put in huge hours on their lectures, labs, and demonstrations. Get it out there!
Tags: Creative Commons, Education, Mathematics, open education, open source, teaching, University of Minnesota, VideoI keep going on about how hard it is for well meaning people to make good decisions without accurate feedback, and this video has a nice way of visualizing the problem. Now if I could just get all our appliances to make balloons like that…
Coin operated gas meters were common in the UK for many years, and in some ways it would be nice to return to something like that. It would make you think a second before automatically hitting that light switch when you enter a room, and it would certainly encourage you to turn the damn thing off when you leave. We still haven’t gotten a bill from all the utilities we’re connected to here in the UK, and we went months with absolutely no feedback on our energy consumption. If there’d been little meters on everything, we would have very quickly learned where the big energy sinks were. As it is, we’ll probably never really know.
It’ll obviously never happen, but I can dream.
Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for the pointer.
Tags: climate change, conservation, economics, energy, Environment, VideoWhen Republican candidates are reduced to this sort of nonsense, you know there’s trouble afoot. Man, I want a president endorsed by Chuck Norris. And the reference to Huckabee’s hunting experience right after the border protection point was just plain creepy.
Apparently this is the only campaign ad this guy is gonna run.
shudder…
Thanks (I think?) to Marc Andreessen for the pointer.
Tags: Politics, VideoPaul Rand is responsible for a number of iconic pieces of graphic design (e.g., the classic IBM logo), and this is a nice short film combining examples of his work with short snippets that I assume came from interviews with him. Some great quotes include
A work of art is realized
when form and content are indistinguishable.
When form predominates, meaning is blunted,
but when content predominates, interest lags.
But the genius comes in when both of these things fuse.
and
Don’t try to be original, just try to be good. That might sound naive, but it’s true.
There’s a neat bit where he goes over the “language of form”, listing important concepts like texture, shape, balance, and tension. It would be fun to sift through my photographs and look for a good examples of each of these. And probably revealing as well, since I strongly suspect some of his terms would be much better represented in my images than others.
Tip o’ the cap to Panopticist for the pointer via 37Signals.
Tags: Art, design, Photography, Video
I just discovered The Gapminder, a very cool visualization tool created by Hans Rosling and others. It gives you the ability to visualize changes in a variety of socio-economic indicators across both space and time, with particularly effective use of simple animations across the time dimension.
It’s really cool to play with, and there are a lot of things you can change that aren’t immediately obvious (I found the short demo in the on-line help quite helpful). You can certainly learn a lot by goofing around with it (as well as generate a lot of meaningless visual noise). The screenshot above is from a plot of life expectancy vs. per capita income over time (the default plot you get when you start it up). I had to watch it a few times to sift out some trends, but after getting past the obvious “generally, more money means longer life” I realized that lots of blue bubbles (i.e., African countries) were “falling” out of the cloud at the end like particulates settling out of a liquid. This indicates that their life expectancy has plummeted in the last few years, which is obviously not the right direction. Why? Almost certainly the continuing AIDS crisis in large parts of Africa, and visualizations like this make it painfully (literally) obvious that this must be cause for serious concern.
In the graph above, I’ve highlighted Botswana,which shows a particularly depressing case. Both their life expectancy and per capita incomes were moving in a happy direction until the early 90’s when, despite continued gains in per capita income (which I’d like to know more about), their life expectancy flew the wrong direction.
Take a second to think about the enormous human suffering a change like that implies.
Thanks to John Hawks for the pointer. Hawks points out that the use of circles of different areas probably isn’t a great way to visualize quantitative differences (a general point Tufte raised years ago), but Rosling’s going for quick impact rather than quantitative precision:
So far, we have had a major hit with two target groups: children under 12 and heads of state. What they have in common is that you have only 5 to 10 seconds to impress them.
(You just have to love the reality that you need the same tools to communicate with little kids and world leaders. Maybe we should just put the little kids in charge? They might have more empathy.)
One thing that really annoyed me when I wrote this post was the fact that you can’t easily embed these graphs in a web page. I don’t think I’d really appreciated how used I’d grown to being able to embed images, video, maps, slideshows, and the like in blog posts. I think embedding has become absolutely key to the success and mass propagation on the web, and people designing new tools (or updating existing ones) better keep that in mind.
Tags: AIDS, change, economics, graphics, Politics, public health, Video, visualizationI dug up this short film by Virgil Widrich after seeing Lessig use a bit of it in his TED talk, and it’s one of those amazing bits of hyper-obsessive homage that you just have to admire, even though you’re probably grateful that you’d never have the time for this sort of thing. Parts are a little long, and some of the tricks a bit obvious, but most of it is genuinely wonderful.
Great stuff, especially for all those major film buffs out there!
Tags: film, mash up, VideoOr, more on how the world is changing wildly while we’re busy making other plans:
This is a wonderfully simple and provocative video. You can quibble about some of the details, but don’t. Step back and soak in the big picture. And then think about how we educate our kids and ourselves. (I’m sure that teaching children that the earth is 6,000 years old must be a win. Really. Just must be.)
The folks at The OpenHouse Project get credit for both the pointer, and for relating this to the Lessig video.
Tags: change, Education, future, technology, VideoA total hoot!
Yeah, I remember those glacial dot matrix printers and the screech of 18.8 modems. They were the bomb in their day, though, and I’m sure that most of what we’re all trendy about today will look equally dated in 10 or 15 years.
Heaven help us all if national security were to depend on finding a payphone these days!
Thanks to TechCrunch for the pointer.
Tags: change, culture, funny, technology, Video
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